Very much so. Nehru's desire to get a territorial fait accompli done while pursuing diplomacy with China was a very big gamble. Indeed, it might have worked had the Cuban Missile Crisis not distracted both superpowers at once. Unfortunately, he couldn't foresee that China would get a one month window to solve the territorial dispute by force. As soon as China got that window, all his strategic cards--diplomatic backing, an approach of 'non-violent aggression'--became zeros or even strategic liabilities.
In the end, the fault doesn't lie with Nehru for having a bad plan or having weakness--the fault lies with him for either 1) not understanding India's own strengths and weaknesses properly or 2) being too lazy to create contingency plans in case diplomacy failed.
If there is one lesson that India has absorbed to heart now, it is to plan and plan for diplomacy to fail. The Sundarji and Cold Start doctrines both reflect that, and I have no doubt India has a realistic Sino-Indian war plan in place. However, India now has a different issue: it doesn't realize that its plans are obsolete in the face of nuclear weapons. Conventional aggression against a nuclear armed state on any level higher than the company or battalion--that is, higher than the tactical level--risks triggering MAD.
India needs to translate its doctrinal approach to figuring out non-military ways to resolve its territorial and existential problems, like crafting a set of cohesive economic levers to pull on vis a vis its neighbors--just look at, for example, how deftly China channels money to SE Asian elites (such as co-opting both the Royals and Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, or hiring hundreds of retired Pentagon and congressional officials to lobby on behalf of Chinese firms looking to buy American high-tech companies.) Unfortunately, I just don't think Indian politics has that requisite lack of moral scruple, absolute ruthlessness, and non-ethnic, non-religious, purely monetary thought process that goes with the current Chinese technocracy and that is necessary to pull a strategy like that off.